Search results for ""Little Toller Books""
Little Toller Books Going to Ground
Going to Ground is an anthology from Little Toller's online journal, The Clearing. Gathered here is some of the best and most distinctive writing about nature and place, from more than thirty writers celebrating and questioning our landscapes. Contributors include Nancy Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Tim Dee, Tim Hannigan, Louisa Adjoa Parker.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Deer Island
From his experiences as a rough sleeper in London in the early eighties to the wilds of Jura, Neil Ansell has woven a beautifully told memoir, and a meditation on belonging.
£11.25
Little Toller Books A Coin (Mohetka)
A dual language picture book in English and Ukrainian for children aged 3+. What happens when we lose something special? What treasures can be found in everyday life? Little Romko is upset when he first loses his special coin. But he soon realises he's discovered something much more valuable. With humour and imagination this wonderful Ukrainian-English picture book turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. A dual language picture book in English and Ukrainian for children aged 3+.
£8.42
Little Toller Books The Lost Orchards: Rediscovering the forgotten apple varieties of Dorset
About two-thirds of Britain's small, traditional orchards have been lost since 1960. This is a loss in ecological diversity, in community knowledge and the intricacy of local distinctiveness. In 2007 the pomologist Liz Copas and cidermaker Nick Poole began a quest to find and identify old varieties of cider apple trees around Dorset. The search lasted more than a decade, taking them across the county, searching in forgotten orchards, hedgerows and the corners of gardens. The Lost Orchards follows the journey they took to find, propagate and make cider with Dorset's forgotten apple varieties: Golden Ball, Kings Favourite, Yaffle, Dewbit, Golly Knapp, Tom Legg, Best Bearer and Symes Seedlings. The book is also an illustrated guide to the apple varieties they discovered and an important history of West Country Orchards. This hopeful story will resonate far beyond Dorset and will encourage readers to look closely at their surroundings and conserve their local orchards.
£17.00
Little Toller Books Mr Catsky, Mira and the Sea
A Ukrainian-English dual language picture book for ages 3+ which tells an inspiring journey about what happens when we face life's dilemmas. A beautifully illustrated, heart-warming story about a girl, a cat and their unexpected journey to the sea. Mira has never been to the sea. She's dreamed about going but it's always been too far away. Things change when Mr Catsky arrives and Mira is plunged into an unexpected journey of friendship and imagination.
£8.42
Little Toller Books Millstone Grit
Millstone Grit takes the form of a fifty mile walk through the West Riding and East Lancashire, exploring the industrial towns and moors. Glyn Hughes had grown up in the Cheshire countryside but on moving to the Pennines was deeply shocked by the impact of industry on the natural world; but over time he found beauty in its special landscapes and came to love the people who lived in them. In Millstone Grit the author investigates the specific culture of place - with chapters on Methodism and the Luddites, interviewing a millworker, examining the awakening of an urban working-class consciousness. Hughes is always observant, careful, poetic and no-nonsense, this new edition will find readers keen to rediscover his vision of the north.
£14.00
Little Toller Books The Making of the English Landscape
W.G. Hoskins was one of the most original and influential British historians of the twentieth century. He realised that landscapes are the richest record we have of the past, and with his masterpiece, The Making of the English Landscape, he changed forever how we experience the places we live and work in.Where we see a picturesque scene of rolling hills, distant spires and wooded valleys, Hoskins shows us the line of a Bronze Age trackway, the ghostly impression of an open-field system, the gridiron pattern of an industrial town, or the footprint of a Roman villa. By revealing these traces of the past, Hoskins enables us to appreciate different landscapes as if they were pieces of music, a series of compositions which enrich our understanding of the symphonic whole.While planning and building our future villages and towns, in both green and urban places, this pioneering account reminds us why we must be sensitive to the land and its past as we leave our own marks in England's historical landscape.
£16.00
Little Toller Books The Ancient Woods of Helford River
The Helford River, Cornwall is a place of wonder and delight: one of the very few places in England where ancient woodland meets the sea. "This is oak country, and the oaks have that surprising variety of size and shape that only Cornwall and Devon oaks can offer. Smooth wooded hillsides, subtly mottled with the different greens or browns of individual oak-trees, sweep down to high-water mark." So begins Oliver Rackham's book covering 25 woods, predominantly in the north of the Lizard peninsula, including: Bonallack, Calamansack, Devichoys, Grambla, Gweek, Merthen, Reskymmer, Trelowarren, Tremayne and Treverry. He brings to life the curious industrial and cultural history of this unique area, and shows how these woods have survived and what the future may have in store. Illustrated throughout with photographs, maps and diagrams, this forms the second volume in the regional series The Ancient Woodlands of Britain. This book is published in collaboration with the Woodland Trust.
£15.00
Little Toller Books A Shepherd's Life
Through the story of one man, Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd whose flocks graze the Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset borders, we meet men and women of humble birth - poachers, gypsies, farmers and laborers - striving to survive on the land. As we read, the cumulative affect of their stories becomes much more than a record of rural life. It reads like a lost hymn, sung by people whose lives were disregarded and whose histories are now forgotten. W H Hudson's masterful book, merging fiction, reminiscence, memoir and oral history, was recognized as a classic when it was first published in 1910. It remains so today. First published by Methuen & Co.
£14.00
Little Toller Books The Unofficial Countryside
During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter's nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway's scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.
£14.00
Little Toller Books Seining Along Chesil: Voices from a Dorset fishing community
For hundreds of years, fishing communities along the Dorset coast lived from the shoals of mackerel that migrate between May and October. Fishing the traditional way, with seine nets in shallow waters, tightly knit crews used wooden lerret boats to pull bumper catches ashore. Bound by this communal, seasonal wait and scramble for fish, their friendships and rivalries, identity and language, were shaped by the sea. The stories, photographs and recordings collected here give us a vivid picture of a way of life that has largely disappeared. We hear of family gatherings on the beach, and of men and women who lived for the fishing and whose intimate local knowledge, gleaned over a lifetime and passed down over the generations, were essential to their livelihoods. These voices echo through time to tell us about people who were completely connected to place and who lived by 'the ways of beach'.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Numbers
A bold and colourful counting book, to learn the numbers one to ten in English and Ukrainian side by side, with cheerful animal and plant illustrations – a fun way to get to know the world of numbers for the young. This book is part of the Pineapple Lane series of books for children displaced by war.
£11.99
Little Toller Books Down the River
Rivers are great workings of nature, time and geology. They have long been at the very centre of human culture, sustaining us with water, food, power and stories. Our thoughts flow like a river. A river's journey, from source to sea, is a metaphor for life. H.E. Bates's own journey began on the banks and in the waters of two contrasting Midland rivers. The River Nene's jumbled course and character, with its towpaths and locks and bridges, speaks of human industry on its journey to The Wash. The River Ouse, in contrast, with its wide meanders brimmed with reeds and smoky willows, rich in wildlife and wild flowers, is an uplifting, ephemeral water, a river of summer memories and flag irises, the blue pulse of kingfishers and pike lurking in weed-shadows. Peopled by his relatives and neighbours, both the Nene and the Ouse, however different, filled H.E. Bates's imagination with the wonderful stories and characters that make his writing so enjoyable.
£14.00
Little Toller Books An Almost Impossible Thing
An Almost Impossible Thing follows the lives of six hitherto unknown women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.
£12.83
Little Toller Books How Many?
A dual langue book in Ukrainian and English for readers of three years and up. How many clouds are in the sky? How many rays does the sun have? Not all questions have answers, but asking them begins a journey of imagination and connections. How Many? is a playful counting book that encourages children to keep asking questions about the world.
£8.42
Little Toller Books Nature Cure
To celebrate Richard Mabey's 80th birthday, a reissue of the seminal Nature Cure, originally published in 2005 to great acclaim. At the height of his career, having recently published Flora Britannica, the author and naturalist fell in to a deep and all consuming depression. Unable to rise from his bed, his face turned to the wall, Richard Mabey found that the touchstones of his life - his love for nature and the land - could no longer offer him solace. But over time, with help from friends and a move to East Anglia, he slowly recovered, finding a new partner, and a new relationship with landscape. Nature Cure, full of nuance and energy, was a pioneering book in the genre that has since become known as New Nature Writing, and received many plaudits on publication. For this new hardback edition Richard has written a new foreword and Little Toller has commissioned a new jacket by the celebrated artist Michael Kirkman.
£18.00
Little Toller Books Diary of a Young Naturalist: WINNER OF THE 2020 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING
Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize, Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of Dara McAnulty's world, from spring to summer, autumn to winter, on his home patch, at school, in the wild and in his head. Evocative, raw and beautifully written, this very special book vividly explores the natural world from the perspective of an autistic teenager juggling homework, exams and friendships alongside his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. With a sense of awe and wonder, Dara describes in meticulous detail encounters in his garden and the wild, with blackbirds, whooper swans, red kites, hen harriers, frogs, dandelions, skylarks, bats, cuckoo flowers, Irish hares and many more species. The power and warmth of his words also draw an affectionate and moving portrait of a close-knit family making their way in the world.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Shalimar
In her mid-twenties, shortly before her father's death, Davina Quinlivan moved from her family home in west London to begin a transitory life in the countryside: here she felt restless and rootless, stuck between Deep England and the technicolour memories of her family's migration story. Beginning in colonial India and Burma, from the indigenous tribes from which the women in Quinlivan's family are descended, and reaching the streets of Southall and Ealing, the stories of her ancestors persisted in the tales, the language, the cooking and culture of her family. Quinlivan conjures a place between continents and worlds in a lyrical debut of migration, and homecoming, marking the arrival of an exceptional new voice.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Time and Place: Notes on the art of calendars
Dates are invented things. Nothing in nature decrees that today is today. But for millennia humans have divided time into portions, and given those portions names which are shared widely across cultures, creating a common agreement on the date. This convention is useful in practical ways: we can make arrangements and can communicate time elapsed or time ahead. But the calendar also makes a certain kind of truth and establishes that today is today. As calendars and almanacs developed, art from their specific time and place was naturally incorporated. In this small book showcasing the finest and most interesting art that has gone into almanacs, from the eight century onwards, Alexandra Harris brings in everything from Benedictine calendars to Old Moore's Almanack.
£12.00
Little Toller Books Cornerstones: Subterranean writings; from Dartmoor to the Arctic Circle
Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of the rock, showing how it shapes our familiar landscapes. Adapted from the successful BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones explores how different rock types give rise to their own distinct flora and fauna, and even affect the food we eat.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Love, Madness, Fishing: A Memoir
Soon after Dexter Petley began writing down his observations of people on the borders of rural Kent and Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s, he realised that his stories were acquiring a broader significance. Between the riverbank where he taught himself to fish and the secondary modern where gardening and smallholding were on the curriculum, he witnessed the lives of a demobbed generation who were still adjusting to post-war Britain, surviving hand-to-mouth, eking out a living mending cars, recycling scrap metal or hop-picking. This fractured landscape, carried like an heirloom since boyhood, has allowed Petley to untangle the fragments of his own life, from the loss of his first love to the nomadic existence he has been living ever since, in London, Africa and France. Here is an unsentimental memoir of exceptional quality. Reminiscent of Laurie Lee and H.E. Bates, each story is peopled by vivid, earthy characters who gravitate around the lakes and ponds and rivers that have flowed through Dexter Petley's life.
£15.00
Little Toller Books The Military Orchid
Jocelyn Brooke's love affair with wild flowers and home-made fireworks began when he was growing up in Kent and exploring the countryside of the the Elham Valley. But there was one particular flower, especially rare and beautiful which became an obsession. Over three decades and through two world wars, in the deserts of Libya and the woodlands of Italy, in the chalk downs of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, he searched continually for his most beloved and elusive Orchis militaris, the military orchid.Against the backdrop of his quintessentially English upbringing and his army career, with ts wonderful cast of snobbish neighbours, eccentric public school teachers and bullish staff sergeants, Jocelyn Brooke blends memoir, botany and satire to recall his lifelong quest. The Military Orchid is a comic masterpiece and became widely revered: Kingsley Amis decribed Brooke as "brilliant and exciting", John Betjeman called him "as subtle as the devil", and to Anthony Powell he was "one of the most interesting and talented" writers to emerge after the Second World War.
£10.00
Little Toller Books Ridge and Furrow: Voices from the Winter Fields
In his haunting debut, Water and Sky, published in 2014, Neil Sentance explored the history of his family and the landscape which shaped them. Ridge and Furrow continues the project to chart in prose the voices of a seldom recorded people and place. From the long shadows of war and want, to facing the great changes to rural life in the twentieth century, to first forays into a world beyond the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the book delicately portrays the dreams of lone, and often lonely, figures in one family's history. Ridge and Furrow melds memoir and fiction, place and nature writing, told with characteristic lyricism and muddy realism.
£12.83
Little Toller Books A Sculpture That Sings
A Sculpture that Sings is a unique book about church bells, bell-ringing and the place of the tradition in the English landscape and its communities. In 2017 the artist David Ward and the composer Orland Gough came together to work with a group of bell-ringers in rural Dorset and later at St Paul's Cathedral in London.
£15.18
Little Toller Books The Screaming Sky: in pursuit of swifts
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2021. Swifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the earth like nothing else on the planet. They watched the continents shuffle to their present positions and the mammals evolve. They are not ours, though we like to claim them. They defer all our categories and present no passports as they surf the world's winds. They sleep in the air, their wings controlled by an alert half-brain. Yet for all their adaptability and longevity swifts have recently been added to the Red List of endangered birds. The Screaming Sky is a radical new look at the common swift, a numerous but profoundly uncommon bird, by Charles Foster, author of the New York Times bestseller Being a Beast. Foster follows swifts lyrically, manically yet scientifically. The poetry of swifts lies in their facts and this book, the paperback of the Wainwright shortlisted monograph, draws deeply on the latest extraordinary discoveries.
£12.00
Little Toller Books Exchange
Food is fundamental to life. The way we produce it is the most pressing issue of our times. In recent years, several family-run farms in the downlands of West Dorset have decided to radically change their approach to working the land. When the artist Chris Drury and poet-novelist Kay Syrad began collaborating with this group of farmers in the villages of Godmanstone and Sydling St Nicholas, they began to discover why these changes were being made and what they might mean for the local communities - and all of us - who depend on the farmed landscape for food. Chris Drury's artwork and Kay Syrad's prose-poetry combine here to form a sensitive and authentic portrait of a group of men and women whose lives are shaped by the land. It is a rich exploration of work, soil and the sustainability of their farming practice. With its focus on a very particular landscape, the book reveals to us the creativity and resilience of organic farming, and shows just how much we all need to value the complexities of food production and our future relationship with the land.
£12.83
Little Toller Books The Allotment
Allotments are sanctuaries for growing, often on the fringes of suburbia, where life is getting ever more stressful and expensive. Here, a simple urge to grow-your-own or become self-sufficient, brings us closer to a community of people, wildlife and plants that are often more diverse than the cities and towns that surround them. An allotment is a utopia. It is a green place where anyone can occupy a piece of land, and grow with freedom of expression. Allotmenteering started with The Diggers in seventeenth-century Surrey, in response to the Enclosure Acts which deprived ordinary people of access to land. But the idea spread, first across England and the British Isles, then through Europe and the world. 'The Allotment', originally published in 1988, is the classic study of allotments. Encompassing the oral recordings of plot-holders alongside descriptions of regional variations on the plot itself, such as pigeon-fancying, seed collecting or leek competitions, it looks at British society and history through the prism of allotments. With a new introduction by Olivia Laing, this is a story that is just as relevant today, and is essential for those interested in social history, land ownership and gardening in twenty-first century Britain.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Set My Hand Upon The Plough
In 1939 the writer Enid Barraud, disillusioned with her city life, left London and went to live in a village in Cambridgeshire, joining what became known as The Women's Land Army, one of thousands of women who worked the land, while war raged overhead and abroad. In her recently rediscovered memoir, Set My Hand Upon The Plough, first published in 1946, Enid writes with remarkable candour and honesty about her life on the farm on the Home Front. Barraud preferred to identify as male, was known to the other farm workers as John, and lived with her female partner. The book now joins the ranks of important LGBT memoirs and casts new light on the lives of men and women who fought or worked for the liberation of Europe. This new edition has an introduction by Luke Turner, author of Out of the Woods and Men at War.
£14.00
Little Toller Books My Home and Things I Own
The perfect companion to starting to learn everyday English and Ukrainian words, this beautiful book is also a treasure trove for children starting to explore the wider world, starting at home, with its familiar objects and rooms. One of the Pineapple Lane series of books in English and Ukrainian.
£11.99
Little Toller Books Elowen
In the summer of 2017, Will and his wife Amy lost their baby, Elowen, a few days before their due date. After a traumatic induced birth, they returned from hospital to their cottage in the New Forest, grief-stricken and struggling to make sense of what happened to them. Unmoored by sadness, what became clear in the weeks and months following Elowen's death is that there is no established vocabulary with which to understand this experience, either for Will or the people around him. Indeed, as he discovers, there is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child. Without any linguistic or emotional scaffold, the disorientation of his grief feels ever more lonely and alienating. Elowen charts the darkness of Will's grief over the course of two years with unflinching honesty, but it also describes in sonorous prose what sustained him: the natural world, and in particular the silence and attentiveness of tracking wolves in the forests of Sweden. These animals, only ever fleetingly seen, nonetheless provided profound solace, and in the act of searching for them he began to find a way to live with his grief. This profoundly moving, ultimately uplifting book challenges the way we think about loss and help us to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world. Elowen is not only a remarkable portrait of grief, but also an impassioned hymn to the wild and a treatise on the restorative potential of nature in uncertain times.
£18.00
Little Toller Books Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach
In the depths of winter in 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer and earning a modest living as a teacher and organist, set off on a long journey by foot to Lubeck to visit the composer Dieterich Buxterhude, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey and its destination were a pivotal point in the life of arguably the greatest composer the world has yet seen. Lubeck was Bach's moment, when a young teacher with a reputation for intolerance of his pupils' failings began his journey to become the master of the Baroque. More than three hundred years later, the writer Horatio Clare set off to recreate this walk, following in Bach's footsteps. The result of this journey is Something of his Art, an imaginative evocation of what the twenty-year-old composer would have seen and felt on his long journey is a sustained visualisation of the landscape, light and wildlife of early eighteenth century northern Germany. Bach becomes Clare's walking companion, a vestigial but real presence, as he acutely observes the season and places he passes through.
£10.00
Little Toller Books Herbaceous
As climate change erodes the familiar pattern of the seasons, we turn instinctively to the life cycles of herbaceous plants to guide us through the year. The growing, flowering, seeding and dying back of wild flowers, weeds, herbs and garden perennials sustain and enrich our lives. Herbaceous is a journey which follows the colour pulse of plants through the year, looking for the new and emerging rhythms. Beginning with the bright yellow, followed by the vernal whites of spring and the pinks of summer, the blues of early autumn and finally the browns of seeds set as winter comes. Herbaceous is gardening with words - asking us to look again at our relationship with plants and celebrates their power to nourish our spirits.
£8.43
Little Toller Books In Pursuit of Spring
In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.
£14.00
Little Toller Books Wild Life in a Southern County
Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.
£14.00
Little Toller Books King of Dust
King of Dust is a craftsman's personal journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture which first inspired him to pick up tools. This journey through the Romanesque celebrates the lives of medieval carvers and contemporary stonemasons, interwoven with Alex's own life as he becomes a stonemason.
£12.00
Little Toller Books The Shining Levels
John Wyatt first encountered the Lake District during a boyhood camping trip to Windermere. He was overwhelmed by the freedom of the landscape and the closeness to nature he felt. It was as if he belonged here, amongst the fells, the crags and the endless horizon. This call to the wild stayed with him, becoming so powerful that one day he did what many only dream of: he left a steady job and his town life to become a forestry worker in a Lakeland wood at Cartmel Fell. This is one of the finest books ever written on the Lake District. Like Thoreau, John Wyatt embraced the simplicity of living alone in a woodland hut, immersing himself in a life made rich by birdsong, foraging for food the smell of woodsmoke, and the extraordinary companionship of Buck, a young roe deer discovered in the woods.
£14.39
Little Toller Books In the Country
At the end of the 1960s, Kenneth Allsop, a famous television presenter and literary man-about-town, left London and settled amid the sunken lanes, ancient forests and chalk streams of west Dorset. He was at his very happiest here. He thought it the loveliest place on earth, and for three years he devoted a weekly newspaper column to his day-to-day life at the mill, brimming with humor and delight for the wildlife which shared his home. In the Country is not rustic or romantic. It is never unrealistic about agricultural modernisation and social change in the countryside. Yet, steeped with a deep sense of the past, Kenneth Allsop's writing speaks in defense of the natural world and stands firmly against the unchecked exploitation of the land. First published 1972 by Hamish Hamilton.
£14.39
Little Toller Books Wanderers in the New Forest
Known as the 'grandmother of herbalism', Juliette de Bairacli Levy travelled throughout Europe and North America in pursuit of her passion for herbs and holistic medicine, living mostly in rural places whose nomadic communities helped expand her knowledge of plants and living from the land. In the early 1950s, she settled in a thatched 'cabin' in the New Forest for three years and raised her children in the woods.Originally published in 1958, Wanderers in the New Forest describes an extraordinary family life living wild: drawing spring water from Abbots Well, bathing in Windmill Hill Pond and sharing the water with their animal neighbours, foraging for fruits and fungi or tending to their forest garden of herbs, flowers and vegetables. Juliette's friendships within the local Gypsy community enabled her to record the impact that post-war modernisation was having on their traditions, ancient rights and intimate knowledge of the New Forest. This new edition is illustrated throughout with photographs taken by Juliette while living in the forest.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Landfill
The unlikely stars of Landfill are gulls. No, not seagulls. Gulls. Over the past century gulls have been brought ashore by modernity, living in our slipstream, following trawlers, ploughs and now rubbish trucks. They are more our contemporaries than other birds, living their wild lives in towns and cities, grabbing a bite where they can. Our story is theirs too. In Landfill, Tim Dee follows gulls to rubbish dumps, meets gull-watchers, discovers ancient poets, Victorian novelists and learns how gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world, if we'd only listen.
£12.00
Little Toller Books Nemesis, My Friend: Journeys Through the Turning Times
This new book of essays from the author of Wild tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in night and winter, it moves to dawn and spring, then noon and summer and finally evening and autumn. Set partly at the author's home in Wales, the book journeys widely, searching for a dead father in Prague, listening to the Sky-Grandmothers of Mexican myth and staying with the people of West Papua who, when they know they will fall over laughing, lie down first. It asks: what is the real gift of the misunderstood Goddess Nemesis? Why should flowers be prescribed as medicine? What do male zebra finches dream of? Where do the sands of time run fastest, and how is that connected to the age of anxiety? It explores the dawn chorus; the tradition of sacred hospitality; dust from the time before the sun even existed; the twilight time of the trickster and the daily rituals of morning. In all of these it asks: why does light, through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, affect us? Griffiths concludes this extraordinary collection by deciding that light is in fact how we think.
£18.00
Little Toller Books The Unofficial Countryside
During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places. Originally published in 1973 this landmark book was described by Iain Sinclair as 'a proper reckoning, the Domesday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone.' This beautiful new edition forms part of the Richard Mabey library, published to celebrate the author's 80th birthday and has a cover by the artist Michael Kirkman.
£18.00
Little Toller Books No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: Back to the land in wartime England
On 'Lady Day', March 1943 a group of Christian pacifists took possession of a vacant farm in Frating, a hamlet on the Essex Tendring Peninsula. There they established a working community, inspired by their association with The Adelphi journal, where D.H.Lawrence, John Middleton Murry, Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and others shared ideas for the future with European religious radicals such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Simone Weil. Frating Hall Farm provided a settlement and livelihood for individuals and families (as well as a temporary sanctuary for refugees and prisoners-of-war), and over time became a successful arable and livestock land-holding of more than 300 acres. Scorned initially by their neighbours for their anti-war views, the Frating community won respect not only through their farming achievements, but having established a touring theatre company and choir, for bringing new life to the villages and churches around them. The lost story of Frating Hall Farm is based on the reminiscences of those who grew up on the farm, together with photographs, letters and organisational records, never before seen or published. The book is a kaleidoscopic history of a farm during its eleven-year occupation, and an enquiry into the passionate religious and political ideals of the back-to-the-land movement in wartime and post-war rural England.
£15.00
Little Toller Books An English Farmhouse
Originally published in 1948, and edited by the artist John Piper, An English Farmhouse is Geoffrey Grigson's careful survey of the old English farmhouse, and its associated buildings, whether made from sarsen, thatch, timber, tile or brick. Grigson paints a vivid and human picture of rural life in the preceding centuries and creates a delicate weave of social history.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Beyond the Fell Wall
Richard Skelton spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days were spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his observations and thoughts about this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the life of an seemingly inanimate landscape - its otherwise unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. At the heart of the book is the fell wall itself: vast and serpentine - a vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape.
£8.43
Little Toller Books Orison for a Curlew: In Search of a Bird on the Edge of Extinction
The Slender-billed Curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, 'the slim beak of the new moon', is one of the world's rarest birds. It once bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin, passing through the wetlands and estuaries of Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Central Asia. Today the Slender-billed Curlew exists as a rumour, a ghost species surrounded by unconfirmed sightings and speculation. The only certainty is that it now stands on the brink of extinction. Birds are key environmental indicators. Their health or hardship has a message for us about the planet, and our future. What does the fate of the Slender-billed Curlew mean for us, and for the natural world? What happened to it, and why? In Orison for a Curlew Horatio Clare journeys through a fractured Europe in search of the Slender-billed Curlew, following the bird's migratory path on an odyssey that takes us into the lives of the men and women who have fought to save the landscapes to which the bird belongs. This is a story of beauty, triumph, and the struggles of conservation. It is a homage to a bird which may never be seen again.
£10.00
Little Toller Books The Fat of the Land
In the 1970s, John Seymour's book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency was a huge, international best-seller, inspiring a new generation to "down-shift" to a new way of life. The book has remained in print ever since. But years earlier, Seymour had written and published The Fat of the Land, telling of how he and his family settled in Suffolk and began a life entirely separate from the modern world. This was a seminal book, published the year before Silent Spring, and offers a personal, practical and optimistic vision of a less-mechanized and less polluting world, one that works in harmony with nature, rather than against it. He goes on to document their life and struggles on the land in chapters on cows, pigs, vegetables and wild food in charming prose. More than fifty years on, The Fat of the Land remains an important and inspiring book, one which retains its power to make us think carefully about our own lives. This new edition comes complete with Sally Seymour's original illustrations, a foreword by Anne Seymour and a new introduction by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Farmer's Glory
First published in 1932 and written in simple, direct prose, Farmer's Glory is a portrait of a farming life in southern England and in western Canada, and is a model of the genre: warm and humorous as well as an astute and unflinching account of the hardships of a farming life. Introduced, in this new, edition by James Rebanks, bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life.
£16.00
Little Toller Books The Tree
John Fowles' writing life was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex,to the woodlands of wartime Devon, to his later life on the Dorset coast, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many acclaimed and best-selling novels.Told through his lifelong relationship with trees, blending autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy and nature writing, The Tree is a masterly, powerful work that laid the literary foundations for nature-as-memoir, a genre which has seen recent flourishings in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Richard Mabey's Nature Cure, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk.As lyrical and precise as his novels, The Tree is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and also a rejection of the idea that nature should be tamed for human purpose. Now, nearly forty years after its first publication, Little Toller is proud to republish this classic book as a special hardback, featuring a new foreword by William Fiennes and especially commissioned wood engravings,in the spirit of The Man Who Planted Trees.This edition will be an important addition to Fowles' published works and appeal to the growing audience for new nature writing as a classic of the genre.
£15.00